I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and United Technologies.

New Air Force Chief Must Reverse Service's Downward Spiral

The B-52 bombers still in the Air Force's active fleet were last produced 50 years ago, but efforts to acquire new bombers have repeatedly faltered.(Photo credit: eastleighbusman)

The U.S. Air Force is getting a new chief of staff, and he faces the Herculean task of reversing an institutional decline that threatens to permanently impair the service’s warfighting capabilities. The main reason for the decline is that America’s military spent the first decade of the new millennium fighting enemies with no air forces and no air defenses, so Pentagon spending priorities shifted to other areas. But the deeper problem is that the Air Force has never been comfortable with politics, and that disability can be downright lethal in a democracy.

You can see just how lethal by looking at the barrage of criticism General Mark A. Welsh III faced in Senate hearings to consider his nomination as the next chief. Senators were irate over not being consulted about Air Force plans to transfer or retire hundreds of planes in their states, and wanted to create a commission to review the future balance of active and reserve units within the force. If implemented, the idea would politicize the Air Force’s planning process and further hobble an already faltering institution.

These sorts of problems don’t usually come up for the other military services and they didn’t used to arise for the Air Force. Legislators from a particular state will complain about the movement of an aircraft carrier or the disposition of Army maintenance work, but it’s exceedingly rare for an entire legislative chamber to be up in arms over a service’s budget submission. How the Air Force got to this point is a cautionary tale about what happens to an institution that doesn’t foster the behaviors necessary to get along with diverse political constituencies.

When the old millennium ended, the nation’s newest military service — it became independent from the Army in 1947 — seemed to be on the flight path to a bright future. In 1999, during the final Spring of the American Century, Air Force fighters and bombers led NATO to a crushing defeat of Serbia in the Balkan air war, with little support from ground forces. John Keegan, whom aNew York Times obituary last week called the preeminent military historian of his generation, wrote that Serbia’s defeat proved “a war can be won by airpower alone.”

It seemed new technologies such as precision-guided munitions and low observables (“stealth”) had vindicated the long-held view of Air Force theorists that air power could be a “winning weapon.” Better yet, the victory was achieved not by indiscriminate bombing but rather through selective targeting of critical infrastructure — an approach championed by air-power enthusiasts since the 1920s. Air power thus appeared perfectly suited to an era of American economic and military dominance, an era of small wars in which the most technologically-sophisticated player would always prevail.

That dream didn’t last long. Only two years later, terrorists equipped with little more than courage and imagination attacked the icons of American power on 9-11, and the Air Force was nowhere in sight. The nation was dragged into the longest war in its history, fighting elusive adversaries that the service was ill-equipped to defeat quickly. It eventually figured out how to do the job, but the solution — unmanned drones — wasn’t what air-power proponents had envisioned for the world’s preeminent air service. The Air Force spent most of the decade supporting other services rather than leading the way.

That might not have been so bad if the Air Force had managed to hold its modernization program together until a “real” enemy came along. Most military experts realized that Al Qaeda would never pose the kind of threat to American survival that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had. And money was flowing freely to all of the military services during the Bush years. So it should have been possible for the Air Force to maintain the pace of modernization despite the focus on unconventional adversaries.

But it turned out that the Air Force’s internal bureaucratic and political weaknesses were too pronounced to keep the air-power story on track, so once the “shock and awe” stage of overseas conflicts had passed, the service began steadily losing altitude. The first big political setback came in 2003, when investigators determined that a senior civilian weapons buyer had biased competitions in favor of her future employer, Boeing. That turned into the biggest Pentagon procurement scandal since the Reagan years, and aborted a plan to jump-start modernization of aging aerial-refueling tankers by leasing a hundred from the same company.

The effort to purchase new tankers became a poster child for poor management practices. When the service subsequently ran a competition and sought to award the program to Boeing rival Northrop Grumman, the Government Accountability Office ruled the Air Force had failed to fairly apply its selection criteria and so the service had to start over. By that time, the 400 KC-135 tankers in its fleet — crucial enablers of the service’s global reach — were approaching an average age of 50 years. Today, four years later, the service still hasn’t managed to acquire a single new tanker, although it at least has awarded a development contract.

Shortly after the tanker program became embroiled in controversy, senior advisors around Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began questioning a plan to replace the service’s radar and eavesdropping planes with a version of the same jetliner Boeing had proposed for the aerial-refueling mission. Being able to monitor hostile activity in the air, on the ground and across the electromagnetic spectrum is a core competency of the Air Force, but its Cold War fleet of sensor planes has grown decrepit with age. Rumsfeld’s advisors argued some of the missions should be done from space in the future. When the two sides couldn’t agree, the plan to replace the planes was canceled and so the service now is saddled with a costly collection of antique airframes to perform some of its most vital missions.

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